This is not an announcement of a solicitation. This is a Request for Information (RFI). The U.S. Geological Survey, National Biological Information Infrastructure (NBII), is requesting information regarding vendors capable of providing a Biological Distributed Search Tool. This Request for Information (RFI) is issued for planning purposes only and is not a Request for Proposals (RFP) or a commitment by the Government to issue a solicitation or ultimately to award a contract on the basis of this RFI. Responses to this RFI will not serve as proposals, bids or offers, which could be accepted by the Government to form a binding contract. Submission of any information in response to this RFI is completely voluntary and shall not constitute a fee to the Government. The main purpose of this RFI is to conduct market research and determine the organizations capable for future competition. Responding to this notice does not guarantee participation in future U.S. Geological Survey activities. RFI responses will be accepted in hard copy only. No electronic responses, such as email or fax, will be accepted. All proprietary and restricted information provided in response to this synopsis should be clearly marked. Responses should indicate if the vendor is considered a large or small business. Please ensure you have included your email address, mailing address, and telephone number in the body of the response. The information provided should be sufficiently detailed to demonstrate that the vendor understands the nature of the work involved, and has the expertise and resources to successfully perform. All responses are limited to a three to five page narrative on eight and one half by eleven inch paper, using a 12 point font. All responses shall be in the English language. Responses must be received no later than 3:00 p.m., Mountain Standard Time, January 4, 2008 to the following address: U.S. Geological Survey Acquisition and Grants Branch, MS204 Attn: Kathleen Markley Building 53, Room H1122 Denver Federal Center, 6th and Kipling Denver, CO 80225 RFI OVERVIEW The USGS National Biological Information Infrastructure (NBII0(http://www.nbii.gov) is seeking to deploy a distributed search tool. A distributed search tool will allow us to search distributed repositories of biological and ecological data/information. This RFI will be used to survey the marketplace, identify potential innovative approaches, and gather additional requirements for a Request for Proposals (RFP) that USGS expects to issue in the near future. The NBII is a collaborative effort among federal, state, local, and foreign agencies, international and non-governmental organizations, academic institutions, and private sector groups to provide an intelligent gateway to biological data and information worldwide. NBII is used by land managers, scientists, legislators, educators, and the general public for purposes that include land-use decisions, scientific research, policymaking, and the general information needs of its users. PROJECT BACKGROUND The need for an improved distributed search tool is due to the rapid growth of all content on the Internet and the corresponding increase in demand for biological information of all types. The World Wide Web presents tremendous opportunities and a wealth of information to users, but the quantity of that information can be overwhelming. The user who attempts to find information a particular species, a biological concern, species image, publication, land management plan, or additional information can be come confounded by the sheer volume of data and information available-often not relevant to the user's subject or domain of interest. To address this dilemma, the NBII team developed a distributed search tool, BioBot(http://search.nbii.gov) in 2000, to meet these demands. However, due to the increased complexity of the biological community, increased user expectations, and a need to improve the delivery of biological data and information, the NBII is seeking an alternative search tool to support its management, retrieval, and delivery needs. DESIRABLE FEATURES The NBII is designed to provide access to a number of local and distributed electronic resources in both a secure and un-secure method. These resources can be structured data, unstructured data, and/or contain summary metadata. Typical target resources are: technical reports, case studies, datasets, journal articles, management plans, proceedings, images, fact sheets, or other biological web resources. Resources may or may not contain summary metadata (i.e. meta-tags or typical Office Automation Property tags). Resources may or may not conform to NBII Program standards including: Dublin Core, Federal Geographic Data Committee Biological Data Profile, Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Standards, and various local schemas or standards (http://metada.nbii.gov). The NBII Biological Distributed Search Tool must provide advanced, user friendly search features to support the NBII Program's overall goals and objectives. These desirable search features are briefly summarized below to allow all vendors, reseller, and integrators to respond as to their ability to provide these desirable features. These features are not in priority order. 1. Full-text, fielded, and Boolean searching of un-structured and structured content 2. Sharing results and/or index content in RSS and other common interchange formats 3. Customization of the user interface, via an open API, for user defined and system presentation of search results into tabs, folders, geographic view, or other groupings. This includes the ability to support multiple Search User Interfaces, with potentially different UI presentation of query input and results, for different audience types. 4. Provide automatic clustering of search results based on dynamic content results or other various methods. 5. Inclusion of "multi-collections" or "views" of information for querying and searching by users. 6. Incorporation of an NBII-base provided, underlying thesaurus to aid users in the selection of terms and the system in the broadening or narrowing of query terms. This can be accomplished via web-services, SKOS, and general SQL. 7. Integrate various web-services, for query expansion or field lookups, to improve user provided terms and automatic suggestion of terms. Examples would include the NBII supported Integrated Taxonomic Information System (IT IS) to support species information, AJAX based user suggested terms, and gazetteers to support place name lookups. 8. Spell checking of user provided query terms. 9. More "like" or "see similar results" query expansion. 10. Crawl/Harvest and index, via schedules and automated settings, various content formats including: xml, html, .txt, and typical office automation formats (.doc, .ppt, .pdf, .xls, etc). This also includes the ability to crawl and index various sql compliant database management systems, Open Archives Initiative (OAI) supported repositories, and standard web-services. Desired is the ability to manually control the crawler radius, as well as the capability to create inclusion and exclusion rules, both within the target domain and for external links; automatic scheduling of crawls/jobs; ability to crawl secure/controlled sites; and support automatic generation/extraction of metadata properties on targeted documents. 11. Map or cross-walk metadata properties to other formats in support of user retrieval and presentation of search results. 12. Customization of the search engine ranking algorithm based upon weightings of metadata fields and weighting of "Reliable/High Quality/Trusted" sources. 13. Retrieval and indexing of up to ten (10) million documents or items. Response time should be no more than three (3) seconds. 14. ADA and 508 compliant 15. Compliance with NIST Security guidelines and requirements. 16. Administrative and Management report tools. 17. Additional unique Vendor provided features: 18. Ongoing support, maintenance, training, and example best practices of implementation by other federal organizations. INFORMATION REQUESTED Each prospective vendor, reseller, or integrator shall provide the following information: A. General information on the search tool products(s), capabilities, and functionalities. This would include white papers, marketing materials, or other product information. B. A three to five page narrative, 8 - x 11 paper size, 12 point font, addressing the List of Desirable Features to describe specifically how the products and/or services meet the requirements. C. Any additional capabilities, requirements, or innovative approaches relevant to the discovery, management, delivery, and visualization of biological data and information.
